Linda Rottenberg discusses "scale-ups" with WOBI

Mar 4, 2013

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Endeavor CEO and Co-Founder, Linda Rottenberg, spoke with the World of Business Ideas (WOBI) on the inflection points entrepreneurs face.

Is it okay to fire a friend? Should your company take capital? Do you want to franchise? “All of these strategic questions are the decision making points that we find at endeavor,” Rottenberg says. “ [These] are the moments of inflection when companies either stay flat or have that hockey stick effect.”

She discusses in the interview that not everyone is going to be a high-impact entrepreneur. “Entrepreneurship at the end is about the stomach. Do you have the stomach to make those tough decisions and to try to mitigate risk?”

Rottenberg finds that most entrepreneurs are not fearless risk takers. They want to be responsible and make smart choices. But where can they go for help?

“I think mentorship is really key,” she tells WOBI. Rottenberg believes that learning from the successes and failures of others can help entrepreneurs get past these points and properly scale their businesses.

The founders of WOBI, Nelson Duboscq and Eduardo Bruchou are two of Endeavor’s earliest entrepreneurs who have benefited from such mentorship. Since joining Endeavor’s network in 1999, their company HSM Group, which provides executive management education, has grown in revenues by 397%. HSM launched WOBI last year, providing another multimedia platform for sharing innovative business ideas from experts like Rottenberg.